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not with another pupil, but with himself; he learns that virtue is its own reward and that the approval of conscience is the most substantial prize that can come as a result of work faithfully and well done. Abbotsholme is the parent of a number of schools of its type. Most of them are in England, but some are in Russia,

Switzerland, France and Germany. Chief of these are the schools at Ilsenberg, Germany; Bedales, England, and M. Demolins' school, in France. Any one of these three is worthy of separate treatment and special study, and all openly acknowledge their indebtedness to Abbotsholme, which was their inspiration and prototype.

THE HIGH SCHOOL FRATERNITY.

S. B. MCCRACKEN, PRINCIPAL HIGH SCHOOL, ELKHART, IND.
[Read before the Indiana State Teachers' Association.]

In the broadest sense a fraternity is an
organization of congenial spirits. The
rational purpose is social culture and mu-
tual help in times of need. The fraternal
organizations of Odd Fellows, Knights of
Pythias, Modern Samaritans and a score
of others have this basic principle bor-
rowed from the church or the Bible. The
good these voluntary associations among
adults have done is beyond estimate and
worthy of all praise. Although the only
fraternity the writer has ever joined is
the Baptist church. The same fore-
thought, hard work, and liberal amounts.
of
money required by these various
lodges, if put into the church, would reap
all the substantial benefits, and more than
the secret societies promise. The home
and church life furnish a very large field
for fraternal culture to all who see their
ideal meaning and strive to live the sim-
ple life.

When young men go away from home to attend college there is for most of them a period of homesickness and strangeness to the new life and customs. And if they do not fraternize with any church or Y. M. C. A. spirit there, they naturally turn to the substitutes for these associations found in the Greek letter societies.

So it may be these secret societies serve a most useful purpose, if their leaders are level-headed and manly young men, if there is the spirit of genuine helpfulness, no waste of money in expensive functions, no loss of time by late hours, no ruin of health in excessive eating, drinking and smoking-and further if there is not fostered the brutal gang spir

it of college and class jealousy, and if there is no stooping to college political spoils methods. If these points are all guarded, the college fraternity may justify its existence. But we all know how much danger there always is of foolish. excess in any organization wholly managed by inexperienced, hot-headed young men. More especially if these young men do not know how many cents there are in a dollar.

With these preliminaries that set forth the writer's point of view, out of the way, we come at once to the high school fraternity.

The high school fraternity is a new phenomenon-let us hope a swiftly passing phase of high school evolution-and high school teachers being compelled to assume some attitude towards it, are everywhere interested in three questions. First: How and why the fraternity comes into the high school. Second: What is its influence for good or evil in the high school? Third: What should school authorities do about it?

First, then, as to how they come in. No doubt primarily they come in as an initiation of college life, as an attempt of high school pupils to ape their admired older brothers who, when at home, talk so much of the doings of their college "frat." They come in because of the American's born love of organization, love of voting and love of holding office.

They are usually brought in by boys of well-to-do parents who desire some notoriety, not likely to come to them by merit in the regular high school work. Naturally these boys make the qualifications for

membership, tacitly at least, good manners, good looks, good clothes, plenty of money, and ability to attract favorable attention of girls. Fraternities sometimes enter a high school because its teachers are out of harmony with one another and court popularity with factions of well-to-do pupils. Many young high school teachers are themselves fresh from their own college fraternity experience and have not studied, or willfully ignore, the injurious effects of such imitation societies upon adolescent boys of fourteen to eighteen years of age.

One important reason for the unchecked growth of fraternal societies in high schools is in failure of teachers, parents and pupils to see clearly that the great purpose for which the school exists, is the making of character in the daily class room recitation. Social functions, literary societies, special day exercises and exhibitions of all kinds are secondary, if not wholly unnecessary, and are in these modern days better managed outside of school with older heads as advisers and leaders. Altogether too much has been expected of our American schools. The high school must not attempt to absorb the proper functions or responsibilities of polite society, the church and business institutions.

Much

of necessity must be left for Young Men's Christian Associations, Sundayschool, Epworth League, Christian Endeavor and like young people's societies. with responsible leaders.

Another reason why the fraternity is in many high schools is the fact that a college is located in the same city. For all disciplinary purposes such high schools are most unfortunate. And if the location is a large city, still worse, and superlatively bad if that city is Chicago, the home of anarchy, the home of the murdering mob strikers, and consequently the home of bad school discipline. With these conditions in mind. you will understand why Judge Hanecy issued a personal injunction restraining Principal French, of the Hyde Park High School, three squares from the University of Chicago, from controlling the

organized rebellion of fraternities in his own high school last year.

Teachers and parents have failed to see the difference between adult benevolent orders like the Masons, or Knights, and these degenerate, unnatural growths in the high school. They have failed to discriminate between the proper use of edge tools, poison, and dynamite, in the hands of adults, and the same misused in the hands of spoiled children. For in answering the second question, "What effects do fraternities produce in the high school?" it is very evident they are edge tools that cut the school into discordant, warring factions, cut down high ideals. of attainment, and cut off frank and cordial relations of pupils with teachers.

Fraternities are poisons that kill the roots of true friendship, swell the student's idea of his own importance, embitter and disgrace the school by the horse play of imitations, and shrivel both body and soul by the debilitating use of tobacco.

Fraternities, like dynamite, explode at unexpected times in open rebellion, and destroy respect for superiors, for law and order, and thus unfit their members for a life of co-operation in a republic.

Dropping the figure, the fraternities are opposed to democratic ideals, and establish instead snobbery and arbitrary accidental distinctions. Habits of extravagance and social dissipation are formed and political dark-lantern methods inculcated in the management of student enterprises and interests.

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High school fraternities are cences as useless and demoralizing as the blanket-sheet Sunday newspapers, and as potent in stirring up irrational strife in the school as the yellowest journals are in social life, economic life and political life.

If fraternities were graded, those for adults of the Mason type should be marked very good; the Greek letter type in many colleges, very variable, and the high school type, very bad-in Chicago.

In answer to the third question, "What shall we do about it?" begin a well-organized campaign of elimination.

Much can be done by heart-to-heart talks with the boy leaders. More can be done by personal interviews with the intelligent parents, and by parental meetings, where facts may be effectively presented.

If the school board can be induced to put itself on the right side, the teacher's fortress becomes well-nigh impregnable. Get and publish the school board resolutions of St. Louis, Kansas City and Seattle, which bar all frats from school functions and honors. These boards recognize their responsibility to govern the schools under their charge and to keep them from hurtful influences. Collect sentiment of the three hundred high school teachers of Chicago and of all the

experienced high school teachers in our own State. There are no teacher apologists for the fraternities in Chicago, and it is to be hoped none in Indiana. Give publicity to the special committee report made last July to the N. E. A. at Asbury Park, on pages 445 to 451. Make free use of the papers on high school fraternities by Principal Morrison, of St. Louis, and the one by Superintendent Cooley, of Chicago, or, better yet, get these men to come and lecture to your patrons on this subject.

Finally, adopt some means of control, elimination and ultimate suppression if you would remove the greatest enemy of happy, noble high school work of today.

INDIANA TEACHERS' READING CIRCLE DEPARTMENT.

THE NEW HARMONY MOVEMENT. GEORGE BROWNING LOCKWOOD, ASSISTANT SUPERINTENDENT WINONA ASSEMBLY AND SCHOOLS.

Individual freedom was the dominant aspiration not only of the great generation of Americans in which Thomas Jefferson was a leader, but of the very civilization of the continent from the landing at Plymouth Rock until the ideal had been forever fixed in the constitution of a new republic.

And yet that political and religious freedom for which the builders of a commonwealth pursued their perilous journey across the seas was sought as the right of an individual, not as something which the individual inherently owed to others. The founders of Plymouth Colony left behind them the shores and the ties of a fatherland to brave the dangers of a trackless wild, that they might have the right to worship under the guidance of conscience only; and yet they whipped Quakers through the streets and drove Roger Williams into exile because these men sought the same rights the Pilgrims demanded for themselves. Under the ensigns of the Revolution, the men of

Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas, inspired by Jefferson's immortal doctrine that all men are created free, fought to a triumphant conclusion, with sacrifice unmeasured, the War for Independence, and then went home to resume the buying and selling of beings for whom the Revolution had won nothing but the certainty that their thralldom would be continued longer than if the colonies had remained the provinces of a European power.

Yet our forefathers were, according to their lights, consistent. Their conception of freedom was an inheritance from centuries through which religious and political freedom had been but a right wrested from the grudging hand of authority. The practical political conceptions of men, however revolutionary they may be, are always the offspring of experience. "The roots of the present," one writer has said, "lie deep buried in the past," and successive experiments in idealistic government, among which New Harmony's noble endeavor toward the unattainable stands conspicuous, have shown that no political structure, however wise its plans or splendid its proportions, can be reared on foundations. other than those which the slow accre

tions of time have furnished. So it is that we proceed so slowly from one stage of progress to another. So it was that the tide of human aspiration which through the centuries succeeding the first break in the structure of feudalism, beat against the bulwarks of established wrong, slipped backward after many a forward surge, while the proscribed adopted the policy of proscription, the reformer turned bigot against a new dissenter, and the friend of freedom became the intolerant oppressor of those who questioned. his authority.

From the eighteenth century, then, the closing years of which were marked not only in the New World, but in the old by the disappearance of hateful survivals. of feudalism before the emancipating influences of an age of research and freer thought, our forefathers inherited their passionate devotion to the doctrine of individual rights, and their belief in the ability of men to work out their ultimate destiny if only existing oppressive legal forms and obnoxious social traditions could be swept away.

It is not difficult to understand why our forefathers believed a century ago that in individual independence they had found a solution of all the problems affecting the welfare of American citizenship. There was no crowding for elbow -room in the new republic. When the constitution was adopted a population little larger than that contained today within the borders of our own State was scattered from the White Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico. There were no crowded factory centers such as those which Macaulay thought would ultimately produce the undoing of democracy. Each citizen to a degree unattainable except in the earlier stages of frontier settlement, was the center of his own republic. Freedom as our forefathers. saw it meant the preservation against invasion of the borders of one's own little principality, within the settled limits of which each citizen was both king and subject. Washington and Jefferson and their contemporaries were continually urging the importance of education, and giving as the principal. reason therefor that

through education the citizen might become conscious of his rights and be delivered from the danger of subjection to tyrants. It was in this spirit that Thomas Jefferson, seeking in his declining years to found within the shadow of Monticello an institution which should help to perpetuate the form of government he and his contemporaries established, chose as its motto: "And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free."

It was with a strange misunderstanding of conditions that Robert Owen brought not only to the United States, but out to a frontier only partially redeemed from savagery to civilization, a scheme of government intended to remedy a social and political situation which it has taken a century to suggest even in its earliest stages on this side the Atlantic. Robert Owen imagined that the people of the young republic, free as they were from that influence of tradition which in England seemed an insurmountable obstacle to social reconstruction, would readily adapt themselves to the revolutionary proposals of the New Moral World. Owen found, on the contrary, an almost total unconsciousness of the "great trinity of evils which had afflicted men from the beginnings of civilization to this time." In his conception even of the problem, to say nothing of his far reaching scheme for its solution, Owen in his new environment was a century, almost, before his time. His New Moral World was a vast scheme of duties, and it was sadly out of place among a people conspicuously conscious of their fresh won independence, and disposed rather to guard their personal rights against invasion than to search out their obligations to one another. The spirit of the American people was the spirit of Thomas Jefferson rather than that of Alexander Hamilton. Their fear was of overgovernment. Mr. Jefferson told Robert Owen that he considered the constitution pretty much of a failure, and this was because the sage of Monticello saw the nation assuming broader functions than most of the framers of our scheme of government believed would ever pertain to the republie. The laisser faire (let alone) doctrine

was firmly established in those days of individual empire. In Owen's plans for living in common, working in common, sharing in common, curiosity was countrywide for a time, but the undertaking was so grotesquely out of its natural environment that it was foredoomed to failure. But the succeeding century, through the processes of industrial evolution, has brought to our country and our time the consciousness of the problem toward the solution of which Robert Owen gave so many years, so large a fortune, with such unselfish and heroic zeal; a problem deeper and more vital than any of the merely political questions which have so long been the text of debate and the rallying cry of warfare; a problem as limitless in its difficulties and its perplexities as human life itself.

A century ago the relations of our people were in no sense as intimate as they are today, and the individual was in infinite degree more independent of his fellowmen than now. New York is nearer St. Petersburg today than it was to New Harmony in Owenite days. A famine in India, an uprising in China, a revolution. in Russia, a coal strike in Pennsylvania, is of more vital concern to us now than would have been the engulfing in an unknown sea of all that portion of the North American continent west of the Mississippi to the people of Massachusetts a century ago. All the activities of an age of enterprise and invention, which in the past few decades have been centering in our own country, have served to lessen each man's distance from his neighbor, and to increase his dependence upon other men.

While the borders of civilization have been widening, measured in miles, measured in all else they have been undergoing a contraction that would have been unbelievable a century ago. The special ization of skill, the concentration of industry, have limited and are limiting day by day the sphere of every man's independent activity. Involuntarily every man is involved in a tangled skein of relations from which escape is impossible. The free lands which once lured the adventurous westward, and year by year

2-E. J.

drew out the skirmish lines of civilization until the pioneer movement halted as it stood before the sea, no longer furnish a safety valve for congested centers of population. The period of pioneer settlement, the most picturesque, the most heroic, the richest in its heritage of great qualities handed down to succeeding generations, is drawing to a close.

The movement of population shown by the last census was one of centralization. Even in Indiana the increase in population between 1890 and 1900 was almost entirely confined to towns and cities, yet ours is still an uncrowded State, happily remaining so far unthreatened by the perils which menace the larger centers of population. We of the nineteenth century have inherited from the century preceding a set of conditions differing from those prevailing in this country a century ago in the same degree as the steel mills of Birmingham differ from the wayside forge of the colonial blacksmith, as the shoe factories at Lynn differ from the bench of the itinerant cobbler of pioneer days, or the wireless telegraphy of Marconi, borne instantaneously across the seas which separate the hemispheres, differs from the sailing vessel bringing month-old letters from the continent into the harbor of Philadelphia during the lifetime of Benjamin Franklin. It has in large measure brought an end to absolute personal independence; it has driven in the borders of individual empire. The mightiest merger of modern times is not the work of Mr. Morgan or of Mr. James J. Hill. It is the result of the processes of industrialism, which are making the interests of all men common.

The effect of this revolution? It is to bring us face to face with our fellowmen; to make their problems ours; to lay upon the citizen a certain responsibility for the welfare of his neighbor, from which he may not turn with the question of Cain upon his lips-"Am I my brother's keeper?" A century ago men demanded their rights. Today events are forcing them to recognize their duties.

And first of all we confront the fact that this is an epoch of industrial unrest. It is true that the average man enjoys

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